Wired magazine has a feature article which gives about as much detail as outsiders can expect on the core of Google’s business, its search algorithm. I was surprised to see that philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was an influence. Hundreds of different pieces of information (or “signals”) are used to rank the results, and some of these are contextual to the user: for example, geographical information is used to prioritise results from near your location.

I’ve liked the Google custom search engine since I first played with it shortly after it came out. If you don’t know about Google CSE, it allows an individual or group to create a search form that will perform a full text search using the Google search engine but limited to sites which they choose. This search form, and the results page, can be embedded in any website. I think it is the obvious way to build a cross search across all the centres in an organization like the HE Academy (this was one of my first custom search engines). Better, for teaching and learning you can set up a reading list of recommended sites for a course and let students do a full google search that prioritizes those sites (for a sort of generic variation on this see Tony Hirst‘s Open Educational Resources search). Better still, let the students as a group decide which sites they want on their course reading list.

Building and editing a Google custom search using the interface on the Google site is by no means difficult, but over the past year or so some tools to make it even easier have come out. Read the rest of this entry »